FreeBSD needs fresh blood

How long have you been using FreeBSD. Months? Years? Decades? And you love using it because of whatever reason but at the same time you’re feeling a bit guilty to use it all for free without giving anything back? Well now you’ll have the chance to change that. We at FreeBSD are always in need of new people who are willing to spare some of their time and effort into FreeBSD development.

Comments

I personally think the FreeBSD community needs to re-look there community infrastructure, mainly the web infrastructure and Problem Report/Issue tracking system. Until the community invests in there web presence and web systems FreeBSD is always going to battle to attracting new developers and keeping them in the project.

I also think the FreeBSD foundation needs to look into investing some resources into updating some of the community web infrastructure.

I would like to see the FreeBSD community more dynamic and more flexible on the web.

I can only speak form a Drupal point of view and my idea stems from that, other community members could have different ideas based on there experiences. Ether way I believe some discussion should start looking at a long term web strategy. A strategy that is adaptable and can change as the web and the community change.

In my idea I focus a lot on a groups site. I think this kind of system is invaluable. Besides creating fixed long term working groups, user could create groups to help support GSOC projects or conferences. All this without having to create separate sites and with little effort.

Lastly, something that I see has been discussed before is moving the PR system to something like Bugzilla. Personally again, I like Drupals Project system. Making your project system part of a CMS makes it far more flexible rather than making it a separate detached system. Additionally I feel the issues system should support multiple projects. There should be issue queues for the FreeBSD project as well as major ports and maybe even a website issue queue for website related feature requests and bugs almost like a community issue/project tracking system.

There is more detail and links in my above referenced comment. More than anything I really hope sometime in the future debates and discussions like these leads to long term change so that fresh blood can be attacked and mentored into long term community members and make the community more efficient and flexible going forward.

The biggest problem I see with this request for new blood is that it doesn’t give any specifics about where that blood should be invested. There’s some vague handwaving about the kde and gnome teams, for example, but what potential recruits need is a list of things which need to be done but which have been languishing due to lack of manpower.

Where’s the TODO list? How I do sign up to own one of the tasks on that list, or join the team the team that’s working on it? What specific help does that team need? Where do I find the relevant coding standards, style guidelines, etc?

If you leave it to the new recruits to decide these things for themselves, the result will be chaos — and the things you originally wanted done might never be done.